Last Thursday night, the sirens started wailing in Tel Aviv, the telltale sign of an attack. My first thought was Please, God, let it be a terrorist. Better the familiar trauma of Palestinian terror than the novel horror of Jews shooting at Jews, igniting civil war. Because such a nightmare these days indeed seems conceivable.

Hundreds of thousands of Israelis take to the streets on a nightly basis to protest the government’s judicial-reform initiative, which they believe will strip Israel of democracy and permanently install dictatorial, racist, and, in some cases, criminal politicians. But to many of the millions of Israelis remaining at home, the demonstrations represent something else—a last-ditch attempt by an embittered elite to regain the power it lost at the polls.

As these resentments mount, and the danger of internecine conflict increases, friends are asking me whether we’re witnessing a replay of the year 70 C.E., when Rome besieged Jerusalem while the Jews inside descended into fratricide.

My mother, a former family therapist, was fond of saying that the presenting problem is not the most serious problem, and that is emphatically true about Israel today. Those opposing the reforms, mostly from the political center and the left but with a significant representation from the moderate right, genuinely fear for Israel’s soul. They want to raise their children in this country and are willing to fight for its future. Many are threatening to leave the state entirely if the government destroys its democracy. “Let’s see how long those fascists survive without us,” a business associate of mine declared, pointing to the prominence of high-tech professionals and veterans of elite military units in the protests. “Israel will become Lebanon.”

But those supporting the government believe no less fervently that they are defending their democratically won preeminence, their traditional values, and the embattled Jewish state.

The real problem is not the question of judicial review but the existence of two opposed and arguably irreconcilable Israels. The first is the Israel of its founders, a largely secular, Western-oriented country now living at peace with a growing number of its Arab neighbors. That Israel yearns to be a normal country, a nation of world-class clubs and restaurants, of art and innovation. It wishes to be a state that guarantees equal rights for women, the LGBTQ community, and its Arab minorities. Its citizens are hyper-educated, affluent, and connected with the world. “They basically want Sweden,” a member of my synagogue, a recent immigrant from Paris, told me. “They basically want France.”

[Yair Rosenberg: From this hill, you can see the next Intifada]

But the other Israel does not believe that the Arab-Israeli conflict is over. This Israel doesn’t want to be France. The Jewish people were never supposed to be normal and never have been, it insists. Normalcy is the last thing it wants. Israel is, and must proudly remain, abnormal, a country that invests at least as much in religious learning as it does in technology, and that safeguards its territorial heritage. This Israel sees the Supreme Court not as the last bastion against illiberalism, but as the fortress around which the ancien régime has rallied. It resents those who’d welcome an Islamist party into their government but balk at admitting Torah-abiding Jews, or who care more about their savings accounts than they do about 4,000 years of Jewish history.

Ethnicity, of course, plays an underlying role. Although large numbers of Mizrachim—Jews of Middle Eastern and North African ancestry—participate in the protests against the government, they account for a far greater share of the government’s supporters. Many retain memories of discrimination at the hands of Israel’s Western, Ashkenazi elite. “Israel is not a country,” that same French immigrant, a Mizrachi Jew, told me. “It is a corporation: Israel Inc. And the creators of that company refuse to surrender its management to its workers. The Supreme Court is simply a board of directors resisting their own ouster.”

Religion and ethnicity both complicate the vision of a Jewish and democratic state. Our twin identities grind against each other tectonically. As a recent example of the clash, secular Ashkenazi artists in my Jaffa neighborhood sued to close down the mostly Mizrachi synagogue I attend. Our singing was too loud, they claimed. The artists lost. “Let’s be honest,” the judge told the plaintiffs, pointing to the bells and muezzin calls that daily resound in our area. “You wouldn’t have sued if the synagogue had been a church or a mosque.”

That judge, as far as I could tell, was herself Ashkenazi and secular, which remains for me a source of hope. And yet, the demonstrations continue, and the government refuses to back down. There is no solution in sight.

The crisis will probably end in one of two ways: a compromise that satisfies nobody but preserves a semblance of unity, or a showdown in which Israelis will have to choose between loyalty to the Supreme Court and fealty to the Knesset. The latter will significantly increase the chances of deep-seated instability and even violence.

My prayer last Thursday was perversely answered. It was a Palestinian gunman, not a Jew, who shot three Israeli civilians on Dizengoff Street. But averting the horror of civil war and safeguarding Israel—our country, not the corporation—will take far more than just prayers.

Yes, the Supreme Court must be reformed, its judges chosen by the people and not by sitting justices, and its jurisdiction limited in ways that respect the people’s will. But at the same time, the principle of judicial review—a pillar of any democratic society—must be preserved. At stake is not just the balance of majority and minority rights, but the fate of a Jewish and democratic Israel.

John Wick has never really been a chatty fella. The character’s one big monologue in the first Wick film comes as even more of a shock than his ability to mow down dozens of gangsters while armed with just a pistol and his wits. With the upcoming release of John Wick: Chapter 4, Keanu Reeves has now spent nine years playing the quasi-mute bogeyman di tutti bogeymen, the scariest assassin in a world littered with merciless hired killers who are all chasing each other for the next big bounty. But after watching the series’ newest installment, in theaters next week, I’m starting to worry that Mr. Wick is losing his passion for so much stoic ultraviolence.

In his first scene in Chapter 4, Wick is ferociously punching a padded wooden post, getting ready for two hours and 49 minutes of bone-crunching, blood-gushing action. But asked if he’s ready to make his latest comeback, Wick seems to gather all of his might just to growl a one-word answer: “Yeah.” Four movies deep, he remains a grumpy golem out for blood, bursting into glitzy villain lairs and dispatching hundreds of henchmen with inimitable style. Less and less clear, however, is why he’s throwing himself into all this mayhem. The first Wick movie is a diamond-sharp tale of revenge: The grieving assassin comes out of retirement to obliterate the mobsters who killed his puppy. The maximalism of Chapter 4, on the other hand, can only partially distract from the fact that Wick’s current mission feels a little lost; now his biggest enemy seems to be his own weariness.

The Wick universe is labyrinthine, featuring a “High Table” of hit men with more subcommittees and bylaws than a New York co-op board. The extensive world building has always been part of the fun of the series; virtually every character is at least a part-time hired killer, paying for plush stays in secret grottos with gold coins, and arming themselves with a plethora of fancy guns and bulletproof dinner jackets.

An important part of the Wickiverse is the Continental, a five-star hotel chain; the New York branch is run by the honey-tongued Winston (played by Ian McShane). At the Continental, violence is sacrilegious. In fact, the reason for all of Chapter 4’s brouhaha traces back to Chapter 2, when Wick rashly disposed of an irritating Italian gangster on hotel grounds, in violation of the holy rules. Subsequently, as recounted in Chapter 3, he started going after the lawmakers behind the byzantine system. As a result, by Chapter 4, practically the whole world has turned on Wick, and the bounty on his head has soared into eight-figure territory. His closest remaining allies are a grandstanding hobo called the Bowery King (Laurence Fishburne) and Winston, who continues to help Wick despite previously being punished for doing so.

Even I, a devotee of this series, am having trouble keeping up. Wick is fighting for his life but also for some amorphous revenge on the faceless administrators who want to wipe him out just because he broke one rule two movies ago. This is the first Wick not written by Derek Kolstad, and the current writers, Shay Hatten and Michael Finch, definitely have a looser grasp on the reins of this bizarre narrative. But the director, Chad Stahelski, has been with the series since its inception and is clearly working with his biggest budget yet, so he compensates for any story weakness by serving up a seven-course meal of set pieces.

Surprisingly, on the whole, Chapter 4 basically succeeds. Yes, I checked my watch a few times during the movie, and I might have cut some of the more portentous conversations about fate and free will that played out between a bunch of blade-wielding bureaucrats. But by the last hour of its elephantine running time, Chapter 4 is a preposterous blast—especially when the action relocates to Paris and sees Wick fighting homicidal drivers by the Arc de Triomphe before attempting to ascend the hefty staircase to the Sacré-Cœur basilica while villains leap at him like deadly lemmings. At that point, I didn’t care what his motivations were. I was simply cheering for him to get to the top.

[Read: Millennials just ‘get’ Keanu Reeves]

The film also puts him in Osaka, where another branch of the Continental is run by his old buddy Shimazu Koji (a wonderfully stern Hiroyuki Sanada), and Berlin, where he faces off against a gigantic boss played by the martial-arts legend Scott Adkins, who seems to relish the challenge of doing high kicks in a padded suit and heavy makeup. Through his travels, Wick is pursued by a blind assassin named Caine (the uber-famous Hong Kong star Donnie Yen) and a charming newcomer who brands himself “Mr. Nobody” (Shamier Anderson); both are unwilling allies of the heinous Marquis (Bill Skarsgård), a preening fool who clearly graduated magna cum laude from the University of Evil Villains.

I could explain Wick lore all day and night, and it still wouldn’t make total sense. The universal language of these movies is action, crisply choreographed and reliant on realistic punches, kicks, jumps, and falls, blended with uncanny, laser-accurate gunfights. Wick can somehow shoot a distant foe between the eyes without even looking; he can also do it while engaged in a samurai battle with four other people and riding on the roof of a muscle car that’s falling out of a skyscraper window. (Note: The latter scenario has yet to happen in a Wick movie. But it feels plausible.)

Chapter 4 has plenty of death-defying moments along these lines, but they’re weighed down by Wick’s increasing aimlessness—even some of his allies are beginning to admit that they don’t really understand what his end game is. Unlike the previous movies, the film does opt for an ending that at least suggests the possibility of genuine finality. But I’m unconvinced that this series will ever really end. As long as the franchise keeps making money, Reeves will continue to tote a Glock and face off with other legends of the genre, running around the world, or as far as his legs can carry him.

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